


Delay Of

by Unforgotten



Category: Original Work
Genre: Dragons, Extra Treat, F/M, Manipulation, Telepathy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-07
Updated: 2018-07-07
Packaged: 2019-06-06 18:36:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15200918
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unforgotten/pseuds/Unforgotten
Summary: The dragon would probably have to do less work if he despoiled his maidens right away.It's just that it's morefunto get them to trust him first.





	Delay Of

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LilyGilt (Yirry)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yirry/gifts).



The thirteenth shepherdess was nearly good enough. When his outline appeared beyond the hills, her first thought, slithering in-between his ears, was that he was as beautiful as all the legends claimed. Only a moment later did she think of her flock.

It had been so long, and she was a maiden, if only just. He came very close to taking her. If she'd been a year or two younger, if she'd been the eighteenth shepherdess, or the nineteenth, then perhaps he would have settled. But she had nearly twenty years, and was only the thirteenth shepherdess, after all, and so instead he merely flew over her, drinking in her terror as she rushed her sheep into their covered pen.

He could have flamed it down in an instant and snacked all afternoon long--but when this heat was in his belly, red flesh was never what he hungered for. He flew on, and three hours later was glad he had done, for the fourteenth shepherdess, oh, the fourteenth...

Not only a maiden but virginal, she watched him come in open admiration for nearly a minute before remembering her father's sheep. She was younger than the last, and more becoming...but then, he'd long ago discovered how much more comely sixteen is than nearly-twenty.

It was the work of seconds to dive down, to snatch her within his claws and carry her away. She wriggled within his grasp, and it was delicious, a suggestion of the things to come. At the most furious moments of her struggle, he considered bearing her back down to the ground. He could sate himself on her now, seek out another when his lust wasn't fire-blue behind his eyes.

But there was no finesse in that, and he'd long ago discovered he always regretted taking such a course. He gripped the shepherdess more tightly, and flew ever faster.

***

He dropped her on the floor of his cave. She scrambled toward the sun, as they all did; clasped her hand over her mouth in horror, as they all also did. The entrance to his cave looked down on the river and nothing else, built into the cliff side, nearly three hundred feet up. For a thing so small and fragile to leap from it meant death. They always feared death more than he, at least at first, for none had ever leapt on the first day.

"Please," she said then, as so many of them did. "You're not going to devour me?"

"No."

At this she paled. "Then you're going to...to despoil me."

He heaved a sigh so heavy it might have knocked her off the ledge, had he not taken care to direct it elsewhere. "What _are_ they saying about dragons these days?"

***

The story he gave her was the one that worked: He was the last of his kind, and lonely, drawn to her for reasons beyond his ken. All he asked, all he entreated, was that she remain to keep him company for a time. A season, no more, and she'd be on her way. If his dragon skin frightened her, he was most regretful; he had another skin, one much closer to he own, if she would prefer...?

He courted her not with jewels but with songs, not with gold but with stories. She was sixteen, the loveliest and the brightest age; soon she gazed at him softly when she thought he didn't see, and began to think about what she would do if he attempted to kiss her. He was quite handsome, after all, and no boy had ever looked at her quite so...and he was so lonely, and she his only balm.

***

He kissed her a fortnight after she arrived. For a moment he thought it had been too soon, for she frozen against him, uncertain; but then he cradled her face in his hands and kissed her once more, and she gave in to it.

Soon--and this time it _was_ too soon--he rolled atop her.

"Wait," she said. "I don't--wait."

"I don't feel like waiting," hissed the dragon into her ear, and shoved her skirts up to her waist.

"Get off," she said, already beginning to cry even as she shoved at him with her meager fists.

He tore her underthings away, tossed them to the side, pushed her thighs apart. "I never did tell you why I wanted you..."

He was bigger than she, and stronger. She felt it, as they always did. She went still, as some of them did, and said, "Please, don't. Please. If you care for me at all."

He mounted her, and whatever he might have said next was lost in the heat and wetness of her (so much wetter than she would have been if he'd had her on the flight back, her mind wailing with such delicious confused betrayal; this was why he'd waited, why he was right to wait). He chased it now, as he'd chased it in his dreams for weeks. She squealed and thrashed beneath him, around him, and it only served to excite him more.

Soon it wasn't only her heat he was feeling; it was his own, the raging inferno in his belly that had led him to seek her out to begin with. The first he knew of the change came when she became even tighter around him than she had been, and cried out in agony. Now she fought him even more desperately, not to escape him but to injure, fingers going for his eyes in her desperation--but if he was stronger than she, he was faster as well. He grabbed her wrists in his hand, and pressed them into the dirt above her head. Sometimes he watched their faces as the change went on, but this time he watched his hand around her little wrists--watched as it grew gray and the brown, as scales erupted across the back, as fingernails were replaced by curved black claws.

Soon he would be too big for her, and then one of two things would happen.

He pursued that heat and wondered which it would be, this time.

He got his answer a minute later, when the gray and the brown passed across her skin, her hold on him growing a little less tight, his hold on her growing a little more flimsy. By then, it had gone on long enough, she was far away enough in her mind that it didn't occur to her she might have a new strength; and so he was free to allow his lust free reign, as he grew and grew, until he was himself, and the shepherdess something more than a maiden, something less than a bride.

He might tell himself he had no preference, that a maiden white and still in pieces was just as fine a prize as one who changed with him...but in truth the brief courtships never truly satisfied. It was better to have at least a little longer.

It was the thought of the next time, and the many times after that, when he could have her, breed her, use her as he liked and when he liked until he tired of her (or until she grew crafty and sought the sun while he slept), that finally caused the heat to boil over, and he to spill his seed deep within her.

***

The shepherdess rolled away from him, curled up, and began to weep. It only took a few minutes for her skin to become pink again, for her to shrink back to her shepherdess state. She didn't even seem to have noticed the change, either time--had not noticed anything except the feel of him inside her, his weight on top of her, her own helplessness at the breach.

"I'm sorry," he said, a little later--after she'd been asking herself _why_ for an hour or so, wondering what she'd done that had made him want to do...what he had done. "You're so beautiful. And when you returned my affections...such a lovely thing had never happened to me before. I simply couldn't help the rest. I fear it must...I fear it must be in my nature."

She should have known better than to trust him again, no matter how pretty his words. They always knew better. But even as he begged for her forgiveness, saw and felt her struggling with whether he meant it, he trembled in anticipation of what would come in another few days, or a week or so from now.

They always knew better than to let him back in. Yet what happened next was always the same.


End file.
